are in precisely that state of development and culture to which the drama is best adapted and is most beneficial.  We should naturally expect to find the human mind, in the broad, magnificent West, rising superior to the prejudices originating in the little sects of little lands.  So it will rise in due time.  So it has risen, in some degree.  But mere grandeur of nature has no educating effect upon the soul of man; else Switzerland would not have supplied Paris with footmen, and the hackmen of Niagara would spare the tourist.  It is only a human mind that can instruct a human mind.

* * * * *

To witness the performance, and to observe the rapture expressed upon the shaggy and good-humored countenances of the boatmen, was interesting, as showing what kind of banquet will delight a human soul, starved from its birth.  It likes a comic song very much, if the song refers to fashionable articles of ladies costume, or holds up to ridicule members of Congress, policemen, or dandies.  It is not averse to a sentimental song, in which “Mother, dear,” is frequently apostrophized.  It delights in a farce from which most of the dialogue has been cut away, while all the action is retained,—­in which people are continually knocked down, or run against one another with great violence.  It takes much pleasure in seeing Horace Greeley play a part in a negro farce, and become the victim of designing colored brethren.  But what joy, when the beauteous Terpsichorean nymph bounds upon the scene, rosy with paint, glistening with spangles, robust with cotton and cork, and bewildering with a cloud of gauzy skirts!  What a vision of beauty to a man who has seen nothing for days and nights but the hold of a steamboat and the dull shores of the Mississippi!

* * * * *

HISTORY, GENERAL AND SPECIAL.

=_John Heckewelder,[33] 1743-1823._=

From the “Narrative” of the Moravian Missions among the Indians.

=_112._= SETTLEMENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN INDIANS.

Both these congregations, being supplied with missionaries and schoolmasters, were so prosperous that they became the admiration of visitors, some of whom thought it next to a miracle that, by the light of the gospel, a savage race should be brought to live together in peace and harmony, and above all devote themselves to religion.  The people residing in the neighborhood of those places were also intimate with these Indians, and both were serviceable to each other; one instance of which is here inserted.  In February of the year 1761, a white man, who had lost a child, came to Nain weeping, and begging that the Indian Brethren would assist him and his wife to search for his child, which had been missing since the day before.  Several of the Indian Brethren immediately went to the house of the parents, and discovered the footsteps of the child, and tracing the same for the distance of two miles, found the child in the woods, wrapped up in its petticoat, and shivering with cold.  The joy of the parents was so great that they reported the circumstance wherever they went.  To some of the white people, who had been in dread of the near settlement of these Indians, this incident was the means of making them easy, and causing them to rejoice in having such good neighbors.